Sounding the atmosphere thermodynamics with passive remote sensing

Abstract: As today, continuous sounding of the Earth’s Atmosphere is key to many aspects of the modern society. Weather forecast, climate monitoring, space research, telecommunication, transportation, production of renewable energy, just to name a few aspects that benefit from quantitative information on atmospheric conditions, such as temperature, moisture, clouds, and precipitation. The seminar aims at introducing the basic principles of atmospheric sounding from passive remote sensing instruments. Current technology for passive atmospheric sounding will be reviewed, considering both ground-based and spaceborne instrumentation. Examples of applications exploiting sensors developed by major space and weather agencies (such as NASA, NOAA, ESA, EUMETSAT) will be presented. Short computer-lab sessions will allow the audience to put hands on the analysis of remote sensing data and get their own atmospheric sounding products.

Biography: Dr Domenico Cimini is researcher at the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IMAA). He is also affiliated with the Center of Excellence CETEMPS of the University of L’Aquila. He received the Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of L'Aquila. He has been Research Assistant at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA), and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA). He has experience with ground- and satellite-based passive microwave and infrared radiometry. He has been investigator and co-principal investigator to several international projects funded by European and U.S. institutions.

Abstract: The seminar describes the basic principles of pulsed ground weather radars for the observation of the atmospheric precipitations, working at S, C and X frequency bands (i.e. approximately from 4 to 10 GHz). The lessons are addressed to the students of the course in remote sensing and radio-propagation and it does not require specific knowledge on the subject. However, the knowledge acquired during the courses of radio-propagation and antennas favors the understanding of some concepts introduced in the seminar. After a brief note to the context of the instruments used for measuring rain precipitation, the transmitting and receiving section of a typical weather radar system is introduced and its functional blocks are described. The analysis of the radar received signal is dealt with for both single distributed target (like precipitation) scatter target.

Biography: Dr. Mario Montopoli received the master degree in Electronic/telecommunication engineering from the University of L’Aquila in 2004 and PhD. from the University of Basilicata in 2008. Until October 2011 he was a postdoc at the University of L’Aquila, while from 2011 till 2013 he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at University of Cambridge (UK). From 2013 to 2014 he was an “EUMETSAT visiting scientist” within the Hydrology-SAF consortium. Currently, he has a researcher position at Sapienza Università di Roma .The scientific interests of Dr. Montopoli include mainly microwave radar for meteorological applications, inverse problems and electromagnetic scattering models.